The Toradex Board Support Package for Windows CE is one of the most advanced BSPs available on the market. Aside from the standard Windows CE functionality, it includes a large number of additional drivers as well as optimized versions of standard drivers.

The Toradex bootloader and BSP were designed to be easily configurable. This relieves the application developer from the burden of creating a customized operating system image. Instead, the necessary adaptations can be made by registry settings and adding files to the on-board flash file system.

Toradex even provides the workspace for Microsoft's Platform Builder, which enables the customer to build exactly the same Windows CE image as the standard Colibri image.

The binary for our Colibri modules are available for download for free.

Before building your own Windows CE image, check if it is really required as our standard is very flexible and you can add a lot of drivers, components and programs without building your own image.

Toradex provides the Microsoft Platform Builder workspaces (solution files) which can be used to build an identical image as the pre-built binary images provided by Toradex. However, we recommend to use the binary images and configure them to your needs rather than building your own image. There are many advantages:

The binary image is tested by Toradex and thousands of customers

It is easier to upgrade to a newer BSP version since you only have to upload a new binary image instead of building your own image again

We have invested a large amount of time and resource in developing our Windows CE operating system, and as a result, are able to provide you with an extremely robust, highly optimised and easily configurable operating system with a rich set of functional enhancements.

To unlock the full potential of any hardware platform, it is important that the software is able to make use of the hardware resources in an efficient, effective way. We spend many thousands of man hours improving existing software implementations from device vendors and software providers to take advantage of features that may not have been fully utilised, or are simply not optimal. The result of such investment is that we really do squeeze every last drop of performance out of our systems, allowing you to fully leverage the capabilities of our computer modules.

Testament to this is our Windows Embedded Compact operating system for the Colibri T20 module which is able to cold boot (i.e. boot from power being applied) in 480 milliseconds. We have optimised many areas of operating system startup process, such as cache performance and concurrent driver loading, to achieve this very fast boot time, which today is unrivalled by any similar system.

While our computer modules may be highly standardised, the applications they are deployed in are anything but. Every application has its own specific requirements and to be able to provide a standardised solution that is capable of meeting the requirements of a diverse range of applications requires a large amount of flexibility and configurabilty.

Through the use of the Windows registry, it is possible to configure the behaviour of our customised Windows CE operating system in almost every area you can think of. A short list of examples of things you can do with our registry configuration parameters are as follows:

Configure display interfaces including all resolution and timing settings

Rotate the display to support either portrait or landscape modes

Change allocated video memory

Configure audio and touch screen controller settings

Disable any drivers that are not required

Configure support for different serial interface standards

Modify the behaviour of the USB stack including USB over current control

Our approach means you don't have to mess about creating your own operating system image - you can simply use ours and tailor it to your own needs.

Our Bootloader also provides provisions for system customisation. Examples include splash screen support on system startup and the ability to configure various system parameters such as MAC address and serial number.

We have a very large customer base that have deployed our solutions into a hugely diverse range of applications with widely varying operating environments and conditions. From rally car instrumentation to tsunami warning systems, our operating system has been tried and tested and is one of the most mature available. Our systems run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, without interruption.

The added advantage of so many customers using our standardised operating system is that when fixes or enhancements are made, everyone benefits from them. Our development engineers support our customers directly and so whenever there is an issue that needs addressing or an enhancement to make, we make sure that it is addressed and deployed promptly.

We have extended the standard feature set provided by Windows CE to include additional functionality to help support your needs. For a list of such features, please see the section Special Features and Enhancements.

Our standardised Windows CE operating system includes support for all of the standard features that are provided by the Colibri module. On top os this, we can also provide driver features for non-standard features which may be required, such as Bluetooth stacks and matrix keypads. The below table describes those driver which are included as standard and those which are available for purchase with support hours.

Prior to starting Windows CE development for the Colibri module, we recommend you install the Colibri Software Development Kit (SDK). This will enable you to take advantage of some of the Toradex specific enhancements.
Software Development Kits for all supported versions of Windows CE/Embedded Compact can be downloaded using the following links:

Older SDKs did not have unified names. With the following SDK version the new naming convention has been applied:

CE 5 SDK 6.0

CE 6 SDK 2.0

CE 7 SDK 2.0

CE 8 SDK 2.0

In case you want to migrate your project to one of the new SDKs, some renaming in the *.sln and *.vcproj files has to be done. Toradex provides a command line tool that does this job for you. Run the tool and provide the path to one of your projects as a parameter. You get the tool from here.

Some customers reported, that their SDK was not shown in Visual Studio after finalizing the installation process. Installing the SDK using user Administrator by command line as described for CE 5 SDK solved this issue. Try to uninstall the SDK and install it again by doing the following steps in such a case:

Run the command prompt as administrator (Right-click -> Run as administrator).

Browse to the folder you downloaded the SDK and run installation by typing:

When installing on Windows 10 we noticed that some users have issues with SDK not showing inside Visual Studio.
To fix this issue please check that files are located in installation directory usually: C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows CE Tools\wce500\Toradex_CE500\
Then locate file WCE.VCPlatform.config and add this entry.